STORY ARCHIVE

Gene doping is the terrifying new prospect of performance enhancing methods in sport. How is genetic technology being applied to sport? How does it work? And what are the implications to athletes willing to subject themselves to this "Franken-science" manipulation?

Doping for Gold

TRANSCRIPT

Narration: When it comes to drug cheats in sport - the net is closing in… The frequency with which drug cheats are caught out is a testament to advances in detection; but the bizarre chemical concoctions used by athletes is proof that Doping for Gold is seen to be worth the risk of getting caught.

Maryanne: And as both sides of the equation lift their game the new frontier of illegal performance enhancements is becoming much harder to detect.

Narration: There’s nothing new about performance enhancements in sport. Early Olympians used extracts of mushrooms and plant seeds. And the practice continued gaining pace well into the 20th century when Amphetamines started to be produced, leading to more sophisticated products like male hormones and steroids.

Maryanne: Today athletes are moving beyond drugs like the anabolic steroid THG and nandrolone in favour of harder to detect performance enhancers, like the insidious blood and gene doping. Welcome to the future, where a level playing field is getting harder to find.

Dr Rasko: The motivation to win is extreme and people who want to flaunt the system will do anything to try and overcome the rules.

Richard Ings: Athletes who use these doping substances are committing very serious sporting fraud, they are winning Olympic medals, they are picking up multi million dollar endorsement contracts on the back of committing sporting fraud.

Dr Ross Brown: For example in an Olympic event we’re they’ll be a lot of elite athletes if you have a blood transfusion immediately before the event your time will be probably reduced by up to 30 seconds, so it may be the difference between coming 20th in the race or winning a gold medal.

Dr Rasko: The idea of blood doping is in people who have a need to improve their endurance they want to increase the oxygen carrying capacity in their blood, so soup up the tank by putting more red cells in their body. … To achieve this they have to increase the amount of red blood cells in the circulation, which contains haemoglobin and it’s the haemoglobin, which carries oxygen to the muscles. Well essentially there are different ways we can increase the blood concentration in our bodies, we can inject blood like a blood transfusion from other people or from stored blood from ourselves.

Narration: Another common method is to inject a synthetic hormone called erythropoietin – or EPO for short, which also increases red blood cells in the circulation.

Dr Rasko: The risks of blood doping are very very serious it’s really like creating potentially pea soup in the blood, in other words a thickening of the blood, so you’ve got the risks of stroke of heart disease of clots in the legs and infections if you’re injecting blood into yourself all of those problems are certainly complications of blood doping.

Maryanne: Now if you think this is all sounding a little Franken science you’re probably right, while blood doping is creating significant problems now, the future direction of doping is set to create even more concern, the new terrifying prospect of performance enhancements in sport is Gene doping.

Dr Rasko: For the gene cheats they want to put back normal genes that enhance performance so if you wanted to establish a shopping list for a gene cheat you might think of genes that would improve muscle strength or performance or genes that would encode hormones like EPO or IGF or growth hormone that are currently controversially being administered in some sports people.

Narration: So how does gene-doping work? You encapsulate a foreign gene with a virus, which acts as a vehicle for transporting that gene into the body’s muscles cells. It takes up residence in the DNA and goes to work following the genetic instructions. Mike Ashenden is an expert in the field of drug detection…

Michael Ashenden: What we try and do is look at the horizon and anticipate what the athletes are likely to be using in a year or two years time from now and then we approach the pharmaceutical companies to see if they will help us develop a test for their product before it reaches the market.

Ex Clip: Marion Jones admits to taking drugs and breaks down.

Narration: As recent cases have highlighted, when it comes to doping, the real race isn’t on the field, but in the lab. As athletes move from one undetectable substance to the next, scientists must come up with the tests needed to expose the cheats.

Kerry Emslie: In terms of gene doping I think one of the big incentives for athletes to use that approach is that they know currently there is no test.

Richard Ings: Marion Jones was tested 160 times while systematically doping all the time and never returned a positive test so testing is just one tool in our arsenal for fighting doping in sport.

Narration: If the science being developed at the National Measurement Institute proves to be effective… the blood and gene doping cheats may literally be on the run. Ray Kazlauskas and his team have a new weapon in the fight against drug cheats, it’s a storage concept known as the Tank.

Ray Kazlauskas: The Tank is a storage of samples and we’d store them for presumably up to eight years the idea being that if a new substance becomes available and it’s suspected that the athletes were using it years before we can then go back to those samples analyse for that material and I believe with the new rules have the ability to sanction that particular individual retrospectively.

Richard Ings: If the tank had been available in 2000 with Marion Jones she would have been sanctioned in 2002, in stead it took until 2007 for her to meet justice for her sporting fraud.

Narration: Another new initiative making it harder for drug cheats is The Blood Passport system introduced by the International Cycling Union.

Michael Ashenden: The passports a new development and we’re developing it as we go, blood markers are already in there, some urine markers but in the future we want to build in things like gene markers because we know at the moment genes are switched on and off when you take drugs and if we can build that into the passport we hope it will make it much more sensitive.

Dr Rasko: I think that there’s a constant war between those people who are trying to cheat and those people who are trying to detect the cheats and in order to continue that battle the technology is having to be elevated and developed in order to keep pace with the cheats.

Maryanne: The risks associated with blood and gene doping are still yet to be fully understood, but one thing’s for sure; it’s illegal, as the race firmly moves from the track into the lab the future is bound to be very challenging.

YOUR COMMENTS

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Ryan Taylor - 22 Mar 2009 6:09:48pm

Blood doping has many severe risks associated with it. Due to the thickening of the blood, athletes are much more prone to blood clots, stroke, and heart attack. What makes this performance enhancing technique so appealing is the minimal risk in being caught. Athletes can be tested for blood doping by testing the blood or unine for EPO but it is much harder to detect than more popular drugs. All athletes blood and/or urine needs to be tested to prevent increased use of these methods. I agree, with the majority of the comments, that blood doping is unfair to athletes who devote time and effort to training with out the aid of performance enhancing methods. I also agree that the risks, such as blood clotting, can result in serious injury or death and no one should expose themselves to those side effects.